Seattle Ties Draw South Park Volunteer Into Dangerous West Bank Harvest

Chris Shorne recently returned home after spending a month in the West Bank, an unsettling, sometimes bloody experience that weighs heavy on her mind.

Shorne, who lives in South Park, went to the region as a part of a solidarity campaign where people from around the world, including Israel, accompany Palestinian people, farmers, and families during the olive harvest, a critical source of income and a key cultural event. While there, she participated in more than 20 harvests in a dozen areas. Several were peaceful. Most involved aggression by Israeli settlers or the Israeli military, which sometimes announced that olive groves were in a closed military zone. Three harvests she attended were particularly violent.

"What a number of Palestinians from different areas said to me while I was there is that settlers attack less when there are international volunteers present," said Shorne, who uses her pen name.

Shorne traveled to the West Bank in mid-October as part of the Zaytoun 2025 campaign, a Palestinian solidarity effort during the olive harvest. The Palestinian-led campaign invites "internationals" to be a protective presence, document any human rights abuses, and report the conditions Palestinian people face to local and international media. 

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) the number of attacks on agricultural workers and harvest sites in the West Bank has increased in 2025 compared with the previous six years. As of Nov. 6, 2025, nearly 150 attacks by Israeli settlers or military forces have injured more than 140 Palestinians and eight Israeli or international volunteers working to protect harvesters.

Since the U.N. began tracking numbers in 2006, settler violence hit a record this October, averaging about eight attacks a day in the West Bank, according to U.N. figures. Settler and military attacks have increased sharply since Hamas-led militants stormed into Israel from the Gaza Strip on Oct. 7, 2023, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting about 240 others. In response, Israel launched a retaliatory offensive in Gaza, killing 69,000 Palestinians and displacing around 90% of the territory's roughly 2 million people, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza.

A ceasefire was agreed to on Oct. 9, 2025, by Israel and Hamas and the flow of aid has opened more than before, but violence hasn't stopped. More than 300 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli strikes since the ceasefire.

Spring Will Keep Coming

People who travel to the West Bank to accompany Palestinians only participate in activities they feel comfortable with. For Shorne, she expected to steer clear of the Beita harvest on Nov. 8, because weeks prior, live rounds had been shot at harvesters. But the day before the Beita harvest, Shorne felt compelled to go, because of a Seattle-area connection.

In September 2024, Seattle resident Ayşenur Esgi Eygi was shot and killed in Beita while accompanying Palestinians after a demonstration. Eygi lived in Columbia City, not far from Shorne's South Park home. Considering this link, Shorne wrote to her U.S. support team, "Strangely, because it's where they killed Ayşenur, I have a stronger desire to be there." As she decided, Shorne said a quote from poet Pablo Neruda churned in her head: "You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming."

So on Nov. 8, 2025, Shorne went to Beita. At first, the situation was calm. Then attackers suddenly arrived, and Shorne fled by running down a terraced hill while being chased by Israeli settlers. She heard the shrieks of journalist Raneen Sawafta being stoned and beaten with a club. Volunteers involved in the campaign, who were also being chased, called out instructions to each other. Shorne listened to one volunteer tell her to cover her head because settlers were hurling rocks. Another yelled out to follow a particular path that might create more distance from the attackers chasing them. A volunteer running near Shorne looked back and saw the settlers chasing them were 60 to 90 feet behind them.

A handful of Israeli volunteers, international volunteers, and Palestinians, including medics, were injured. Shorne spent much of that day at the hospital before taking a bus to where she stayed.

Serious assaults are rarely investigated according to human rights organizations.

But by the Beita harvest, Shorne had already faced danger. On Oct. 19, she had attended a harvest in Turmus Ayya where people were beaten unconscious and several cars torched. And the day before the attack in Beita, in the village of Kufr Qaddoum, Israeli military personnel beat people with guns, dropped tear gas using drones, and shot rubber bullets and baton rounds. The military also fired live rounds over the harvesters' heads as the Palestinian group fled the groves.

According to the Washington Post, the Israel Defense Forces controlling the West Bank said it "firmly condemns all forms of violence, which divert the attention of commanders and soldiers from their primary mission of defense and counterterrorism."

Kate Raphael from Seattle has accompanied Palestinians on olive harvests numerous times between 2002 and 2024. "When I was in Palestine during the olive harvest in 2002 and 2003, I worried about having enough stamina to remain out in the heat for eight or 10 hours of picking" wrote Raphael in an email to the Emerald.

"When I returned last year, I never had the chance to get tired, because we were never able to pick for more than half an hour before Israeli settlers and soldiers chased us away." Raphael knows a dozen or so Washingtonians who have volunteered to accompany Palestinians in the West Bank.

For Shorne, this year's olive harvest presented other experiences, including moments of peace. She recounted one harvest in Jurish where Israeli settlers came to the site with a rifle, but left. "There was such a jovial mood," said Shorne. She said they worked in the heat and dust, shaking and raking tree branches to drop olives that pattered like leathery marbles onto tarps spread on the ground. During that day's lunch, she said they flopped on the ground under the olive trees and had za'atar pizzas. "At the end we had six to 10 burlap or plastic bags of olives we put in the car," Shorne said.

In a text to the Emerald, Shorne wrote, "Even when I was scared, I never doubted that this was exactly where I was supposed to be and what I was meant to be doing. It was not easy or comfortable, but being with the Palestinians and other internationals I was with — laughing, praying, picking olives — was one of the greatest joys of my life."

Yuko Kodama is the News editor for the South Seattle Emerald. She is passionate about the critical role community media plays in our information landscape and loves stories that connect us to each other and our humanity. Her weekly "South End Life" column spotlights the stories of neighbors and community members that weave through the South End.